Cory ArcangelCory Arcangel was at the Whitney when I was in New York. I saw it on the first day I was there in a Jet lagged funk, so everything seemed a little surreal to me. And hear was this show that had a focus on old technologies that was so related to my own current research. The first room that you came to was this huge high ceiling cavernous room with the bowling work that is described in the video below. Each projection was so big that the "bowler" was almost life size, which added to the horror that Cory discusses. Instead of doctoring the cartridge to bowl gutter balls each time he doctored the game controllers to do it which was a little bit of detail that I appreciated. There was also a work based around a play station golf game which he had doctored the actual game disk. You could interact and play the game but no matter what you did the ball would always shoot off to the far left of the screen. The security guard who was looking after it though it was a great old joke.

It turns out that Cory Arcangel also did "Super Mario Clouds" a work that I saw some time in 2007 and inspired me to explore a similar trajectory. And directly inspired my last show "Cutting Edge Gadgets", the way that I set it out and my own Mario cloud work. After I saw this work I spent months looking at sights on Modifying technologies. Which stopped me dead in my tracks for a long time until I realised I could get the effects I wanted through film editing techniques.

Lee Ufan

Lee Ufan "Marking Infinity" was showing at The Guggenheim when I was in New York. I had never heard of this artist before I walked into The Guggenheim for the first time. Above is the add for the show, it is a bit bad, but there is quite a good doco on the Guggenheim web site. I was straight away put in mind of Joseph Beuys work and the images of his retrospective that he had at The Guggenheim in 1979, 32 years ago and incidentally in the year I was born. There is a similarity between the two artists that is discussed in the documentary on the gallery's web site. They both use very similar materials, felt and iron and use the space in a similar way. The two artists also have a similar spiritual element to there work, similarities that grew up around the same time on different sides of the world. I spent a lot of the time I was at The Guggenheim talking about Joseph Beuys and Mathew Barney.